Sample School: Zapp

The amazing thing about so much of modern music, from hip-hop and out beyond, is that you’re never really listening to just one album or just one track, you’re skimming the surface of musical history. Most hip-hop artists are as much archivists as they are musicians and if you look a little deeper you’ll find a mind-boggling back-catalog of genius staring back at you. Spend more than a few minutes on WhoSampled.com and you’ll quickly become entranced, digging out track after track to find out which 70s funk hooks, film score overtures and Malcolm X quotes built the flesh around the skeleton of the beat. The purpose of this feature is to give you an insight into a particular band or artist who helped to shape that world, an artist you’ve likely been listening to for years without even realising it.

When you start looking at the way funk music gradually transitioned into more electronic territory in the 80s, first moving in line with disco and then kind of amalgamating with it, you can almost trace the lineage of early hip-hop and house music. Despite one being based on live instrumentation and the other being based on sampling, both favoured very similar beat structures as they began to develop parallel to each other. If you want some primary evidence of this you just need to listen to groups like Zapp.

Even before making the jump from original track to sampled beat, a lot of Zapp’s material already sounded like early, embryonic hip-hop. They were led by Roger Troutman, who started recording group music when he was only 15 years old. He worked with his 3 brothers throughout the 70s under a series of different band names, the Zapp name was originally coined as a nickname for vocalist Terry Troutman. They were all by way of Ohio, and as such spent much of their early career bouncing around the state, something which eventually earned them the attention of another Ohio resident, Bootsy Collins. Collins invited them to record a demo at United Sound Studios in Detroit, where much of Parliament and Funkadelic’s material had been recorded. George Clinton was also involved, and he was the one who advised Troutman to take the demo to Warner Bros, who promptly signed the group as Zapp, setting them to work on their debut album.

After their initial success, Zapp cut ties with Clinton following a bitter financial dispute and struck out by themselves, releasing 4 more albums between 1982 and 1989, although their popularity began to wane after Zapp II. The electronic side of their sound became more and more prevalent with each new release and Roger Troutman is credited with pioneering the talk-box electronic vocal more than perhaps any other artist. He even provided talk-box backing vocals for 2Pac’s ‘California Love’. In 1999 Roger was shot to death by his brother Larry, who shot himself in the head shortly thereafter. It’s never been exactly clear why this happened, but most theorise that it was about money, since Larry ran a housing company which had recently filed for bankrupcy and Roger had fired him from his parallel music management position. In any case, they remain one of the most frequently sampled groups in hip-hop and their career neatly mirrored the emergence of the genre. Here are 3 of their most sampled (and iconic) tracks.

Heartbreaker (Part I, Part II) – Zapp III – 1983
Appears in Give This Nigga by Slum Village

While their third album was far less warmly received than the first two – and considered by many to be the first signs of Roger Troutman’s downfall – it did house two of the band’s most monstrous dance floor jams. The first, ‘I Can Make You Dance’ is potent enough but ‘Heartbreaker’ is just something else. It grabs you from nerve to neurone from the moment it opens and doesn’t let go for the entire 7 and a half minute runtime. Hit play on the video below and see how long you can stay sat still, I dare you. While it’s a far cry from their most heavily sampled joint, it’s formed the backbone of some truly iconic hip-hop tracks. ‘Give This Nigga’ is only a short transitional track, but it’s still an important part of J Dilla’s first album production credit. Elsewhere it appeared in Public Enemy’s ‘Get Off My Back’ and more recently house music titan DJ Dan used it for his 2009 track ‘I Don’t Care’.

 

Computer Love – Zapp IV U – 1985
Appears in I Get Around by 2Pac feat. Shock G and Money-B

Famously it was ‘Dance Floor’ from the band’s second album which featured on ‘California Love’ (which Roger Troutman also provided vocals for), but this 1985 electro-groove is far more indicative of just how obsessed with the synth-driven, talk-box aided sound 2Pac really was. Aside from ‘I Get Around’, ‘Computer Love’ appears in two of his other tracks, namely ‘Temptations’ and ‘Thug Passion’ and although the production credit is different every time, you can tell that Pac had a real affinity for this kind of thing (Prince samples also crop up on many of his tracks). Despite the drop in popularity following Zapp III, this album fared rather better, being praised for its consistency and distinction from previous releases. ‘Computer Love’ managed to climb to number 8 on the R&B Billboard charts and Pac aside it’s still one of their most heavily sampled tunes, being used by everyone from Biggie to Backstreet. It was also used in ‘Love‘, a track from the unbelievably rare Eric B. solo album.

 

More Bounce to the Ounce – Zapp – 1980
Appears in You Gots to Chill by EPMD

This is it, the most legendary track from their most successful album. Beyond just being a sample staple, ‘More Bounce to Ounce’ is and was an intrinsic ingredient in hip-hop culture. Ice Cube cites it as his introduction to that world, recalling seeing a dance group popping and locking to it in the early 80s. As discussed above, this was the demo that got Zapp their first album deal and Bootsy Collins took on production duties. It’s a massive, 10 minute dance floor epic that undoubtedly still fuels b-boy battles across the USA and beyond. It’s been sampled over 200 times from artists all over the world, George Clinton himself used it for a track, as well as appearing on an Ice Cube track which sampled it. This combination of (then) pioneering electronic sound, early hip-hop style beat production and 70s funk influence represents perhaps the most raw example of the transition between funk and hip-hop, the rope that ties the two together.